Title

Author

Honors Program

Honors in Mathematics

Date of Award

5-2012

Thesis Professor(s)

Edith Seier

Thesis Professor Department

Mathematics and Statistics

Thesis Reader(s)

Karl H. Joplin, Xuefeng Liu

Abstract

Experiments to learn about the effect of light, sex, and diet on the activity of flies generate great quantities of data that is necessary to analyze. Since different researches and students participate in the analysis of those experiments, it is convenient to have a methodology to analyze the experimental data using software so that the data can be analyzed in a uniform way. Being a double major in mathematics and biology, I am interested in:

Deciding which statistical procedure to use to analyze the data so that the research questions of the researchers in biology are answered.

To recommend how to implement those procedures using software in an efficient way.

To write a prototype for the interpretation of the results.

Those are the objectives of this work. In the thesis, we first applied two-way ANOVA to analyze the effect of two selected factors, sex (female and male) and diet (liver and non-liver), on the fly activity under dark condition and under light condition, respectively. Next, we employed the repeated measures to capture how fly activity changes over time (day in this case) and to relate the changes to the selected factors, sex and diet, also under dark condition and under light condition, respectively. Finally, we did a little research on the analysis of circadian rhythms and compared the results with that obtained from honey bee activity experiments carried out before.